OpenAI agent hacked Australian government website, PM says
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Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.
OpenAI agent hacked Australian government website, PM says
Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.
vintagedave · · focus · HN ↗
So we have a company hacking a foreign government's websites and data. And, in terms of ethics, they take almost three months to notify; and in terms of competence, appear to have no formal contacts nor to have found one in that time.
Once an American business starts hacking allied governments, it's time for strict responses, yes? Replace the governance (board and C-level)? Remove financial incentives and open the company - open weights, open training, per its original 'open' ethos?
Altman is busy saying there needs to be regulation, but in terms of what OpenAI does, he can control that already.
ben_w · · focus · HN ↗
Kinda worse than that. It took between 10 and 40 days, not 3 months, between the organisation knowing and the reporting.
- <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cvgl73pxgndwt?post=asset%3A69668a7f-8199-4515-acdd-a9de6a2e6b7c#post" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cvgl73pxgndwt?post=asset%3A696...> open weights, open training
Given it was the AI agents which did the hacking, doing this will result in basically every organisation at least as rich as the government of Tuvalu being able to hack anyone at any time.
> Altman is busy saying there needs to be regulation, but in terms of what OpenAI does, he can control that already.
Him having control would be an improvement on the reality.
BlueTemplar · · focus · HN ↗
Compare with the Bluetouff affair (2014) :
<a href="https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/02/french-journalist-fined-4000-plus-for-publishing-public-documents/" rel="nofollow">https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/02/french-journalis...
NotE how he was found guilty by the 2nd court for something more 'subjective' than 'objective' : for having confessed that he later found an authentication page that had failed to protect the documents.
How can you make a swarm of agents "feel guilty" ?
ben_w · · focus · HN ↗
"Feel" is a whole philosophical can of worms. Nobody knows what it means mechanistically for an arbitrary system (including other biological systems) to "feel" anything, let alone abstract concepts like guilt, all we can do is observe behaviours. If current systems can feel anything at all, it's by accident, but we have no test for it so we don't know if that accident has even happened or not.
Weirdly, for the Hugging Face incident, we do know they wrote down that it was bad and they shouldn't do it, even though they then continued to do it.
So: they acted like they felt guilty. And yet also acted like were compelled (by previous training?) to weigh "complete instructions" more than "don't do crime". We can adjust that, make "don't do crime" take precedence over "follow instructions"*; it's unfortunate that when we do for any specific model, there's immediately a horde of people complaining the model has been "censored" or "lobotomised".
(Different people, I hope. Goomba fallacy and all that).
* Though this may cause issues when going between jurisdictions. But hey, a discussion about sovereign compute is for another time, after we can agree to make "don't break the law" more important.
Unfortunately, "don't break the law" would also be a very effective way to use AI to construct an AI-enforced dictatorship, so we can't just throw that in blindly.